


Vasty Heights

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Genre: Alternate History, Bisexuality, Canon Het Relationship, Coming when you do call for them, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Decapitation, F/M, Fantasy, Good mouth-filling oaths, Implied Bardolph, M/M, No rocks fall no-one dies, Punning on arms, Tilting at lips, Uncertain Dialect Usage, Various Objectionable Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:54:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t that he didn’t <em>notice</em> that there was something odd from the start... It was just that it was Christmas night, everyone was half-drunk and bored daft and Sir Henry Percy was a knight of the Garter, Warden of the east marches, Royal Lieutenant in Wales, not a peasant to be affrighted by bogles, wodwos and salvage men nor a florid Celt to speak credulously of trepidations, portents and freaks.  </p><p>(The dreams were another thing, another thing <i>entirely</i>, only a fool could fail to see the difference.)</p><p><i>Of course</i> it was a pleasantry. There was nothing else on earth it could have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vasty Heights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).



> Liberties taken with the Gawain Poet, Shakespeare and history are numerous and manifold. Owing to my ignorance of all three, this story begs the licence of fantasy. 
> 
> Thanks to Cah and Bogbean for Arthurian / Shakespeare-picking and for listening sympathetically to my libidinous witterings during the writing of this story. 
> 
> Thanks are due to G―C― for an extended conversation about the Percy arms, though I fear the poncey porter in this story could not do his expertise justice. 
> 
> All errors and anachronisms are my own.
> 
> Percy's Northumbrian is a synthetic dialect assembled from indistinct memories of two grandparents, web research and the invaluable works of Bill Griffiths on North-Eastern English dialects. Again, apologies for inaccuracies, and I welcome correction. The notion that Hotspur speaks a fairly dense variety of north country in awkward and/or intimate situations _and_ has a (largely controlled) stammer is the mischievous issue of a discussion with Sollers, to whom thanks.
> 
> I've always thought Lady Bertilak needed a given name, and I (unimaginatively and patriarchally) gave her the name of Hotspur's historical wife as a placeholder. It stuck.
> 
> The green steel is for Brer, from Heorennda.

They say a good courtier is never unwittingly rude.  On those grounds one might hesitate to call Henry Percy a good courtier, though it was also true some of his friends underestimated him.  He found that irritating.

He was bored.  Peoples bored him, especially Celtic peoples, of whom there seemed to be lots lately.  Literature bored him, especially great literature. Not that he was about to install this honking alliterative bore in the canon thereof. He looked around for a conspirator, but even Kate seemed enthralled.  Maybe the poem was a good one after all―he didn’t hate all poetry, he wasn’t a _boor_ ―but he’d missed its substance and could only listen to the cadence.  Which bored him. He attended for a moment to the poet’s mewling, and realised that he was a man of the north.  Not _his_ north, but north―it was a bit like the accent of the Cheshire captain who called the dead king Dickon. Percy shuddered, remembering the unsettling affection Richard commanded, even when he commanded nothing else.   

Christmas bored him, especially Christmas at court.  No, Christmas at court _unnerved_ him.  It unnerved everyone.  A mood of tediously circumspect gamesomeness built steadily towards impossibly airless and friable Epiphany: inexplicable silences fell thick and deep as midnight snow, you thanked God every time it was not your shrill, constricted voice pealing some indiscreet commonplace into the midst of one of them.  Until, inevitably, the time it _was_.

Percy gawked around.  His gaze fell on the prince: slow pale brown eyes that flashed yellow and hawkish in animation, beaky nose, high colour, long jaw, a great rawboned frame that he had still quite to grow into―how old was the lad now?  When he put on all his man’s flesh he would be formidable in combat; you’d somehow have to get inside that extraordinary reach―six and a half feet from fingertip to fingertip―just for starters.  And though Percy deplored him, he did not doubt that the prince could fight.  

Hal caught Percy’s eye and favoured him with the sensual crooked smile he gave women and commoners, the smile that said _don’t, whatever you do, develop feelings for me_.  

Percy closed his eyes and thought of Alnwick.  That brought to mind Douglas, whose congenial company he much missed. He was well used to feeling more warmth for his putative enemies than for his supposed allies; such circumstances no longer even struck him as paradoxical.  It was easier to cut down a man with whom you identified, after all.  He had supervised his prisoner’s recovery personally, visited him daily, dismissed and reinstated his physician nearly as often; when Douglas was fit, they hunted together.  He watched, interested, as Douglas retrained himself in the judgement of distance and trajectory with one eye.  Percy’s gift was for close work, and he was fascinated by the marksman’s art, unchivalrous as its battlefield exercise might be.  Anyway, such things were good to know of an antagonist, he told Kate, who snorted,

‘Wash the stink of harthound off you before you come near my bed.’

‘Time was you liked us reet off the field, pet.  Anygait, we weren’t out with the hou―oh.’  

Abashed, he perfumed himself like a milliner and went to her nearly every night, and after a time she said she was with child and he felt guilty relief intermixed with pride and concern, though he thought he had more pleasure of his wife than most men.  She quickened, but miscarried then.  Percy felt at something of a loss to explain to himself why the thought of it made the world lurch and drain of colour, when he had a robust little son of six years and a daughter of three, Kate was back to her whole health, and, anyway, babies died all the time and their mothers with them, and their fathers on the fields of war where nothing ever seemed more straightforward and vivid.

The poet was still droning.  Percy hated having nothing to do but think.  He didn’t have much time for masks and guises, either, but when the eight-foot tall green man rode into the hall on a green stallion twenty-one hands high, he was for once amply prepared to be diverted.

It wasn’t that he didn’t _notice_ that there was something odd from the start: even the people you’d have thought would have been expecting the surprise seemed startled, and the mummer’s get-up was more trashy bleezin French-like stuff than the entertainment budget at the court of Henry the Fourth typically ran to.  It was just that it was Christmas night, everyone was half-drunk and bored daft and Sir Henry Percy was a knight of the Garter, Warden of the east marches, Royal Lieutenant in Wales, not a peasant to be affrighted by bogles, wodwos and salvage men nor a florid Celt to speak credulously of trepidations, portents and freaks.  (The dreams were another thing, another thing _entirely,_ only a fool could fail to see the difference.)  _Of course_ it was a pleasantry. There was nothing else on earth it could have been. 

And so _of course_ when the green man issued his suicidal challenge, there was one of those terrible shifty silences that always happen when players try to get a punter up onstage without having primed the audience properly, and finally the king hauled himself to his feet and answered it, and _of course_ that couldn’t be let stand. Someone had to say something, or it couldn’t go on to the next bit, and it was getting boring.

So he got up, strode through the company, and knelt before the king.  For the first time in his life Percy heard his own voice as he realised others must hear it: loud but unclear, and very, very Northumbrian.  It was so different from other accents, other Northern accents, even, Christ’s bones, from other Northumbrian accents, his childhood stammer having taught him to reckon speech primarily a series of obstacles to be surmounted, and only then a means of conveying thought.  No wonder his interlocutors sometimes ingratiatingly began to imitate its alien intonation.  He’d mostly stopped offering to fight them for that, realising they seldom meant mock by it.  Mostly.

The king accepted his championship with a curt nod, and handed him the green man’s axe.  Jesu, but the thing was no stage prop. The head alone was an ell long, razor-sharp Damascus steel somehow tinted green―how was that done?―and fretted with golden ornament.  The shaft was wound with iron and verdigris bronze.  It was delightfully weighted, despite its size, as if it had been made for him.  The sheer sweet pleasure of handling a well-made object carried Percy lightfoot to where the green man knelt, his vines of green hair thrown over his head to expose the living bole of his neck.  The green man did not look any less real close-to than he had from yards away.  His skin smelled of linseed oil―the paint, of course―and something rank and earthy beneath.

Percy wondered how the sleight of hand would be accomplished, and feared it would make him look a fool, but there was no way out now that wouldn’t make him look a bigger one, and there was always a trick.  He suppressed the thought that sometimes tricks went awry and people died, judged his position, raised, aimed and swung.  He’d never actually cut a head from a living body―that wasn’t really how it went, even in single combat, and certainly not on the battlefield―but the gnarly resilience, brittle splintering and arterial splatter felt and sounded worryingly authentic to his extensive experience of hacking at men and beasts, quick and dead.  The recoil of the blade thumping into the floor nearly knocked him off his feet.

His first feeling was giddy relief: he’d actually done it with a single blow.  The headsman’s art wasn’t an honourable one, but that didn’t mean it was easy, let alone when the victim had a neck half as thick again as the burliest man he’d ever seen.  Percy looked down the hall: he knew this moment, this was the moment before all hell broke loose, and he loved it.  He saw the the sightlines and the pathways between the ridges and bowges of all hell, and elected, with settled, instinctive clarity, his course of action.  Except this time no hell broke loose.  He could see faces―the king’s stolid assemblage of sharp angles and pouches, Hal frozen in aquiline avidity, Rutland’s appalled smirk, Worcester pale and thrawn (though his uncle always looked a bit like that anyway)―clothes―the riches of court dress interspersed with retainers’ loud liveries―women’s tight-laced flesh and buttressed headdresses―the dull glint of pewter in candlelight, gold leaf in paintings and gold thread in hangings, an upturned joint-stool, a host of irrelevancies.  None of it made any sense.  This was how it was, then, for men who had no talent for war: imbecile, random panic. And some of those fought anyway, fought well; what self-mastery they must have. Humbled, he looked down at the twitching green body, the red and white mess of spine, flesh and gristle at its apex, followed the path of the severed green head in its blood-matted foliage.  Percy had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do now.

A man shrieked, and then all the women did. The body was moving.  Bodies always moved, Percy thought scornfully, sometimes they moved a lot and for a long time, as anyone who’d ever seen as much as a butcher’s apprentice showing off with chickens knew―but they didn’t, he was forced to own, jerk to their feet and scramble stiffly around looking for their misplaced heads.  He pointed, realised quite how foolish that was, picked up the immense head and put it with absurd―but it was his _head_ , after all―reverence into the green hands.

Holding its head high by its hair, the green body vaulted onto its horse.  ‘Sir Harry Hotspur,’ Percy bridled; nicknames bestowed by enemies had a peculiar frisson, not to be used promiscuously by the likes of what, convincing as the conjuring had been, could only now be explained as some sort of exotic _minstrel_. ‘I believe we have an agreement.  On the feast of the Epiphany, you will come alone to my green chapel in the wood, and I will return to you the small dint you inflicted upon me.’

‘With pleasure, Sir Bushy Green.’  He thought that was rather good; the sycophantic tinge to the laughter disappointed him a little.  He handed back the axe.

The head tilted in what was recognisably, but most uncannily, diplomatic acknowledgement.  The green knight wheeled his vast mount out of the great hall with, ‘Anon, sir, anon.’  

King Henry beckoned.  ‘Your service is appreciated. We were entertained and informed.’

‘A poor soldier might learn much of the use of weapons from your majesty, but could not presume to instruct.’  

‘We think we did not say _instruction_.  Nonetheless, you seem to have provided some. Our eldest son was much impressed.’ Hal was suppressing either hilarity or a mock-puking fit (it wouldn’t help to know which).  The thought came to Percy, unbidden and unwelcome, that he envied the sword-and-buckler wretch his father’s exasperated love.

Released to its own anti-climactic devices, the company broke early.  Percy found Kate sitting apparently placidly on a low stool in their apartments. He had not been married to this woman since they were both children without recognising that apparent placidity was a harbinger of no good at all.  Nonetheless he felt a distinct prickle of desire.

‘You’re covered in blood,’ she said conversationally, not meeting his eye. ‘I believe there are water butts in the marshalsea.  It would probably save everyone a lot of trouble if you could contrive to fall in one and drown while washing your face.’  

The prickle grew to a burn.  ‘Then I should stay an unhouseled spirit to trouble the widow Percy’s dreams every night.’  He knelt to tilt her chin for a kiss and saw her face was grey and stricken. The burn doused itself as certainly as if it had been dropped in one of those butts. 

‘Hinny―’  

She pushed him away, not petulant, businesslike.

‘Why did you do it?’

He shrugged. ‘Aa’s bored.’

She laughed shakily.  ‘Oh good Christ, my lovely rash bored fool.’

‘It was a jest, a pleasantry. Aa divvent knaa how it was done exactly, but―aa seemed a bit of a gowk, daresay, but no harm―’

‘No _harm_?’ She jumped up and paced.  ‘God’s blood, green man or no, you won’t have your head next week.  I knew something was afoot from the beginning, and then I saw it was a double bluff, to exact some elaborate protestation of loyalty―’

‘Naw―that’s a guiser’s notion.  Richard may’ve done the likes of that, and thought it meant owt.  If Bolingbroke dooted a thing I’d be in chains by now.’

Kate whipped round. 

‘Not that there’s anything to―’

‘Don’t tell me, Harry.  I don’t want to know.’

‘I wish you’d make up your mind.  Come tha ways, lass, gies a buss.’  He felt, belatedly, the exhausted exultation that took him after a fight.  Other men wanted a woman, or so they said, any woman, when they felt it.  He didn’t (of course he’d _tried_ , he’d been married before his sixteenth year and he wasn’t a plaster saint). But of all women only Kate knew what to do, nipping, pummelling, scratching as she straddled and rode him, laying deft choking pressure on his throat as he bucked and spent. 

The messenger came at dusk on St Stephen’s day, a stocky oldish man with an archer’s over-developed chest and arms gone something to slack, a thief’s changeable face mottled into recognisability by drink.  He wore a plain green jupon over greenish mail, which cast a plague tint over his broken-veined face.

Gloomily convinced now that his choice lay between death with a slim chance of honour and death with the certainty of its loss, Percy spent the night writing letters: to his father, his uncle, his brothers, the king; finally, a stiff, pious epistle for his son.

Kate was wearing her _campaign face_ : he usually found it comforting (and to see it break into relief on his return was the great pleasure of his life) but her carefully assumed brisk stoicism irritated him now: this wasn’t a raid or a battle. The notion that she might have felt as he did now every time he prepared to ride away―powerless, clueless―that for her it was no different from a hundred times before―skittered around the fringes of his mind, then departed.  Neither of them retired that night; he dozed with his head in her lap.  Deformed greenish-grey shapes loped and scrambled through the dreams he didn’t quite let himself sink into.   At the third bell he extricated himself (she murmured but did not wake; good, farewells never suited him), dressed, armed, heard mass and made a confession that our subtler theologians might have hesitated over pronouncing _bad,_ exactly.  The green retainer was waiting outside the chapel.

The man proved curious company, often silent but with a propensity suddenly and obliquely to allude to circumstances that one really wouldn’t expect a person of his station to know anything about.  He rebuffed enquiry as to their destination with a disarming mendacity that even Percy could not resent.  He found himself relaxing and chided himself for it: this fellow was exactly the sort of deniable villain to whom deniable orders would descend from deniable sources.  That could mean that he was also deniable enough to be knocked on the back of the head and left in a Hertfordshire ditch, but the dishonour of it aside, Percy thought probably not. 

They made reasonable time considering the season, spending the first night at St Albans, the second at Towcester, the third at an abbey called Merevale.  But on the fourth day they left Watling Street and the going grew slow and nervy.  But the short hours waned on, and the expected ambush failed to materialise.  They camped that night; the man constructed a very creditable shelter among overhanging rocks, as a veteran of the king’s grandfather’s wars might be expected to do.  Percy took first watch, but he did not mean to sleep.  

He woke shortwinded in the foredawn from a dream of rapid water and tangled limbs―a naked man was saving him―no, drowning him―then he was rescuing the stranger, who thrashed unmercifully until in frustration and terrible pleasure Percy seized black hair and submerged the face he suddenly did not need to turn up again to know was a one-eyed wreck of grizzled good looks.  

The retainer had gone, really gone, goods and gear and mount.  In his place, scrawled on the bare rock with a blackened stick from their dying fire, was a crude, energetic map. A savage face with vines scrolling from its lips must signify the chapel, here a hill, a river-valley, another ridge or rise, a castle? Percy absorbed and memorised it, muttering curses, entertaining a comforting fantasy of hanging the heathen sot from the nearest serviceable tree, short rope and shorter shrift, no confederate to end his suffering by swinging on his legs. 

He had leisure to repent over the course of the next day his arrogant, distracted confidence, and to despair, in a land where all seemed blasted, of that tree.  Mizzling rain alternated with sleet and when they abated, hail lashed over a milky noon sun. He hadn't forgotten the map, he knew it, but none of the landmarks it detailed presented themselves.  He saw in every blur on the horizon the promised earthworks or fortress and rode eagerly towards them, to find they were clouds or shadows, tricks of the light.  Close to dusk, he found a few straggling trees and his first human being since the churl had abandoned him.  He called over the woodsman in hope of directions; the man seemed suspicious, but not afraid of an armed and mounted stranger. Their mutual incomprehension, though, proved total.   

Darkness forced a halt, and the misery of his situation flooded in to drown him.  Here he was urgently seeking it, and he could not even find his own death.  Self-pitying tears started behind his eyes; he wept with anger at his inability to suppress them. Who ever knew such king, to take counsel from Christmas carousal? Not king. Usurper.  Percy dissolved into futile imprecation and cross-grained prayer.  He feared sleep, as much from the danger of the cold as from his evil dreams, and this night kept it at bay.

First light brought a modicum of sense, and his first intimation that the wretch’s scrawl might have something to it.  He rode down into a thickly wooded valley, forded a river that made him scarce wetter and colder than he already felt.  As he toiled up the further bank he started to see signs of cultivation: the wood seemed ordered, here and there a pollard.  He encountered a broad ditch, swore bitterly, since circumnavigating it would take him, he estimated, at least six or seven miles out of his way. But it meant habitation; he gained heart.  In fact, it meant much more: as he skirted the fortification he caught glimpses of lawns, a park, turrets of pale new Caen stone.  This wasn’t a rough-hewn border fort, or even a rustic manor: it was modern, luxurious, fashionable.  He wasn’t at all sure he approved.

The porter answered his request for hostel with delight at such a _lion_ of valour appearing _of the blue,_ that were a sight even for the _piked-out_ eyes of _St Lucy_.  Percy replied gruffly; he cordially disliked that species of wit even when it was not uttered by persons of mean standing. The castle’s people greeted him on their knees; rather too many crowded to relieve him of helmet, arms and mount.  He dreamed he saw among them a brand-bright face but it melted away before he could confirm it as belonging to the perfidious servitor. 

Impatient and uncomfortable (the effect of the blazing fires in the great hall replicating on a waterlogged arming doublet that of the blood of Nessus), Percy was conscious of fulfilling certain unfavourable expectations among the elegant gentry who gathered to offer their respects. They were as foppish as any at court; monstrous chaperons surmounted faces as bland and undifferentiated as parmacity, indecently short doublets and ridiculous shoes made it difficult to know where exactly to look.  He dreaded the chief of this tribe of popinjays.  

The man who emerged from the chambers at the south end of the hall was half a hand’s breadth taller than Percy’s six foot; an expanse of chest and shoulder tapered to a waist only a little cushioned by forty-five or fifty well-lived years on earth. Greying red-brown hair curling to his chest and a broad paddle of a beard was all the cope and bonnet he wore in his own hall; his houppelande was of sober cut, dark brown velvet lined with sable, over a squirrel-coloured doublet and stockings.  His features had a weathered, hewn look that reminded Percy of Douglas; his shout of fellowship and enthusiastic, shattering embrace did likewise.

Among men he liked, Percy became good company.  When he admired them as well, he shone.  He had never liked or admired anyone as sincerely as he did Bertilak de Hautdesert, and he found the sentiments returned with warmth.  The knights of the company who had muttered, on learning the identity of their guest, that they might learn something of savagery but nothing of fine words from him, were astonished to see him easy and gracious in too-big borrowed clothes, telling stories against himself, praising the table, the company and the castle in perfect frankness.  

He went arm-in-arm with Bertilak to evensong, and after the holy office was done, met the lady of Hautdesert and her old duenna.  Bertilak seemed to have selected his young wife according to some treatise of proper conduct, the lover’s equivalent of that hunting manual Rutland spent his tedious nights scratching at, and then considered his duty done, for he treated her with an indifferent politesse that suggested recent and distant acquaintance.  Her looks fitted the fashion of the day at every point: a brow naturally high and round enough to require no shaving of her fair hair at the temples, soft small face with features as tiny as an infant’s, little high breasts on a slender torso, long limbs.  Her manner was gentle and reserved, her speech low and unexceptionable.  None of this was in any way to Percy’s liking (and he thought with a pang of Kate’s tender dark ungovernability, that he might never taste again) but it made knightly duties refreshingly uncomplicated.  Sitting between the two ladies at supper, he discovered that while the younger had just as much wit as her doll-like features might suggest, the elder possessed an appreciation of military strategy which tended, to Percy’s mind, just to the proper side of bloodthirstiness.  She was Welsh, and he had lately had enough to do with her countrymen to impress her with fragments of local knowledge. 

Hautdesert was certainly peculiar, but congenial enough to relegate to the back of his mind, for this night and the next, thoughts of his impending trial with the green giant: he even began to entertain again the idea that it was just some extraordinary practical joke.  After a night and a day’s feasting, he retired reeling; bidding him goodnight at his chamber door, the lord caught his shoulders and said,

‘You pledged in open view of every inmate of this place to serve me whilst my guest; that was gracious in one so highborn.  Shall we have a little fun with it?’

Suddenly giddy with something that wasn’t wholly attributable to wine, Percy assented.

‘You’ve had a long journey here, and little rest, yet you revelled with the best of them for the best part of two days.  I purpose some sport tomorrow, but I think you should sleep in until it’s time for Mass.’

Percy was about to protest, but suddenly felt great weariness, and nearly slumped forward into Bertilak’s arms.

‘Whatever spoil I win in the field, I’ll hand over to you; and whatever you get here in the castle, you will give freely to me.  Have we a bargain?’

Percy blinked and tried to muster some decent southron speech.  ‘It’s an unequal yin, for the things a man can catch lying in his bed are na wholesome gifts for’s friends.  And aa have bad dreams.  But aa’m sworn and cannit say ye nay.’

They sealed the bargain with a hug and a fraternal kiss on the cheek.  Percy slept soundly for once, and dreamed that King Richard had been a woman, the office of Pope lay in her gift, and she appointed Sir John Oldcastle.  There was perhaps something unnatural in that dream, he thought as he lay half-aware of the contending demands of his bladder and continued enjoyment of warmth, but at least it didn’t stink of saltpetre and the blood of those he loved.

There was, he perceived, someone in his chamber, really someone, for these were not the scuttling steps of servants.  There was only one person it could reasonably be (though he expected him to be gone to the woods by now) and in that person’s company he was confident he could be frank, so he said, 

‘Howd on, aa’s to piss―and then aa’m―’  

‘My apologies, sir, I’ll retire a moment.’  The voice was sweet, low, unexceptionable.  The small steps (how could he have mistaken them for a man’s?) receded and the door swung shut.

What was the little malapert doing stalking in his chamber? Manners were―different here, but not that different, surely.  His rank protected him from most of the possible consequences, and his prowess in arms from the remaining ones, but that wasn’t the point, damn it. He assumed she’d fled, so he had the much-needed piss, and got back into bed, leaving a chink in the curtain this time.   And there she was, tripping across the rushes like the blessed Virgin herself.  She put her head in at the curtain.

‘Look,’ he said unsteadily, ‘aa divvent―w-w-I mean, I don’t think this is―let me get dressed, and I’ll attend you in the hall at your p-pleasure.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘where’s the fun in that? My husband’s _to the greenwood gone_ , with all his retinue, and my ladies are all at their work.  One doesn’t see much society up here in the Wirral; they’re barely Christians even, and now I’ve the most celebrated knight in all the kingdom all to myself, and he my sworn servant for the duration.  I’m staying put, so you’re going nowhere either, unless you would scandalize a lady with your nakedness.  I think my husband would regard that as―carelessness.‘   She perched on the end of the bed.

Disarmed, he could do little but laugh.  She was a lot brighter than the last couple of nights’ stilted conversation suggested.  At length, he spluttered, ‘Aa warnd ye think yorsel a canny bary mort aathegither, aye?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Never mind.  What have I done to deserve such favour?’

‘You’re too modest.  I’d give priceless pearls for the company of such a peerless soldier and chaste knight as you are, and here I have you free.’

The charge of chastity was undeserved, he felt.  ‘I’m lucky―’ he was about to say _in my wife_ , and that would never do ‘―in stumbling across such hospitality where I’m unknown.’

‘Except by reputation.  But sir, I fear you’ve not told me the truth in one particular.’

‘You must have some champion whom you're anxious to be rid of, my lady, to give _me_ the lie.’  What in Christ’s name was he _doing,_ acquiescing in these idiot games of love, that he’d scorned all his life?

‘I think not.  You said you were Sir Henry Percy, called the Hotspur of the North.’

‘I am that.’

‘And yet you haven’t killed a single Scotsman this morning.’

‘If you could find me Scotsmen here, my lady, I’d kill you fourteen before breakfast, and lay at your little feet their h―’ a chill blast rattled through the chamber― ‘helms and hasps,’ he finished feebly.

She wrinkled her nose. ‘I’ve no use for dead Scotsmen, unless for draught excluders.  Did you feel that? Brr. But if the Hotspur of the North would allow me give him a kiss, then I think I should never feel the cold again all my days.’

It was a way of getting rid of the daft quean, which he now urgently wanted to do.  Her kiss, long and sweet enough to violate the rules of chastity if not chivalry, somehow reminded him of a lark struggling in lime, and gave him the same sort of hot, confused pleasure that such boyish amusements had once.  Then she fluttered away.

Percy’s thoughts during Mass were not holy.  At the raising of the Host it occurred to him ( _allow me give him_ ) exactly what he’d let himself in for, and he let out a low shout which he hoped would be taken for devout ejaculation. He would just have to brazen it out, and get on his way before dawn tomorrow.  That was all there was to it.

The whole household was ordered to the hall, where more dead hinds than Percy would himself take in a month’s hunting lay piled on trestles. (He had urgent Scotsmen to deal with, after all.) The curée had been a bit―lax, and the hall's ventilation wasn't what it might be, but he managed to look suitably gratified at Sir Bertilak’s presentation which must, he said, when suitably hung and prepared, feed the company, gentle and simple alike.  Cheers.  Then it was his turn.  If he survived the year, (which admittedly looked pretty unlikely), Percy swore fervently, he would never allow himself get caught up in Christmas _fun_ ever again. 

Frisking and chittering just below the level of articulate thought was the knowledge that if he didn’t have to do it in front of all these people, in front, God’s suppurating wounds, of the man’s wife, he wouldn’t mind having to do it at all.  The old knight’s lips were hard, warm and dry, but Percy felt the inscrutable frisson of response, and as he broke the embrace saw pleasure reflected in Bertilak’s deep-set dark eyes before they disappeared into creased merriment.

‘That would have more savour if I knew its provenance, young Percy.’

‘Alas, sir, that was no part of our bargain.’

That evening he confessed his quest to Sir Bertilak and expressed his eagerness to be on his way.

‘The reports of your courage aren’t exaggerated, I see.  But there is no need to be quite so keen to shorten your―stay. The chapel you speak of is two miles from here, and there is no other place of resort fit for a gentleman within fifty.  You must let us have the honour of your presence for two more days.’

‘Then might I―join you hunting tomorrow?’

‘But for our wager, sir, I would like nothing better. You understand I cannot place any guest in my debt, let alone one so noble.’

Feeling feverish, Percy retired.  The lock on his chamber door was a ward, of course, not a bolt; the key hung at my lady’s hip.  He was not sure he wanted to sleep behind a locked door anyway.  Nor was he going to sleep in his shirt like a peasant or a prim prioress in her shift. He would not be practised upon, this whole thing was absurd, he would treat it with the condescension it deserved.  Let her do what she would; he would accept nothing.  If he then went empty-handed to his host, all the better.  He wondered why this sensible resolution felt like a disappointment; he didn’t find the lass remotely attractive.

That night he dreamt that Mordake, Earl of Fife, was the king of England and Scotland both, and the commons had revolted and put him on trial for his life.  He was found guilty and beheaded before a vast jeering crowd.

Then she was bending anxiously over him and settling the bedclothes, which had twisted into a rope between his legs.  He flinched away with a bark of protest, but her movements were, he realised, deft as a squire’s, nothing of lasciviousness in them at all.  It was better to lie still.  Under her mantle she was wearing some crazy loose garment of seeming Oriental make, secured only with a girdle.  She bounded onto the tidied bed and sat there hugging her knees, tucking the outer robe around her stockinged feet.

‘You have bad dreams.  I heard you shout in your sleep.’

‘They’re just dreams.  If the devil sends them it’s best to ignore them―if not―well, I hope I’d know if not.’  A little embarrassed at this sortie into theology, he said suddenly,

‘There you are, sitting on my bed, and I don’t even know your christened name.’

‘Oh, didn’t I?  Elizabeth.  And never Ellen or Lizzy or Beton or any of them.  Elizabeth. What do they call you at home?’

‘Kate calls me Harry―I mean―’ he stumbled into confusion.

‘I know you’re married. I know most things about you. You’re quite famous, after all. Tell me about her.’

So he did.  He told her all about the ungainly child of ten to whom he’d been married when he was himself not quite fifteen and the strong-willed woman she had at last become when he returned from France to take her to his bed.  (He did not say that it was rather she who took him, and that it was a revelation, a conversion almost.) He left out the tetchy year when Kate was wholly convinced of her womanhood and he was a self-righteous nineteen-year-old damned if he’d see her die on a childbed she was too strait to endure, what was the use? the babies almost always died too. 

(Had he known Elizabeth de Hautdesert a little better, he might not have left out so definitively the same self-righteous nineteen-year-old’s first―to be honest, _only_ ―mistress, a wispy widow ten years his senior who expected of him either abject gratitude for the yielding up of her virtue or hell-defying physical passion, but never deigned to indicate which might be required on any particular occasion.  An order to assist at the relief of Brest had probably never been welcomed more by mortal man. Nor woman neither, in fairness.) 

He told her that Kate loved to sing, but hated to do so in front of an audience, that she could still speak the words of Welsh taught her by her nurse, though she didn’t know what they meant, that whenever she beat him at chess (which was more than half, but not all the time) she made the triumphant observation that she’d’ve been as good or better a soldier than he if she’d been a boy and taught to fight, and that privily he thought it was probably true, but what he always said was certainly she swore like a trooper. He didn’t say how her foul mouth excited him, in and out of bed. That she was subtler and more intelligent than either of her brothers.

‘She’s not bonny like you, my lady, never was.  But she’s clever like you.’  Bashfully aware of his Northumbrian vowels in _clever_ ―the tight first and open second―he was consumed by nostalgia, fought tears.  And then somehow the chatelaine of Hautdesert had found her way into his arms and his hands were inside her flimsy garment and her mouth was on his, and everything was breathless and giddy.  But when she tried to touch his stiff prick through the sheet he took her hand firmly and lay it aside. 

‘Stay, hen, stay.  Aa’ve―made a vow you knaa nowt of―and besides,’ he said, recovering southron dialect with his senses, ‘it’s no part of knighthood to debauch the belongings of his host.’  He smiled wanly. ‘Not that you wouldn’t tempt an anchorite―’  Though he wasn’t tempted, and he hadn’t been, he’d been _overcome_ ―

She backed out of his arms, and knelt up on the bed. Her green eyes widened and she put both hands to her mouth in stricken silence.  

‘Hinny―’ he reached for her, but she shrank back, ‘no harm―’

‘No harm? Oh God―’  She scrambled down and ran from the room.

Percy sank back on the bed.  What the devil was he going to do now? It was well for her, she’d make a whispered and weepy confession to that worldly-looking chaplain, who’d say how wicked she was with one side of his sensual mouth and with the other that it was the sort of thing that _regrettably_ happened when young women married to men thirty years older than they were misled into these heathen, effeminate cults of so-called love, go and be a good girl, pray to our blessed Mother for guidance, _ego te absolvo_.  He had to―Christ's balls―what _had_ he to do?  

Perhaps it would be all right―he didn’t have to disclose the source of his gift, after all―it could have been a kitchenmaid, (though he’d a thousand times rather admit the truth than have people think him the sort of man who’d stoop to interfering with the staff) or even the crone (who wasn’t, he reflected sourly, doing her damned _job_ )―and really it was no more than a somewhat _aggravated_ kiss―he was still thinking along these lines when he received Sir Bertilak’s request for his company, not in the hall, but in the lord’s apartments.

The private sitting room was decorated with the sort of luxury Percy had not seen since Richard’s days at Westminster―who was this fellow, anyway, rich as whatsisname and he’d never seen or heard of him before?―Turkey carpets and Toulouse tapestries, chests of cypress wood and cups of silver and gold, two great fireside chairs piled with quilts and cushions trimmed with ermine.  And in the midst of all, the gutted corpse of a huge boar on a rough thick blanket.

Percy thanked his host, who nodded to four brawny servants to haul the thing off.  Playing for time, he asked Bertilak for an account of the chase, and they settled to the story over cups of wine.  The old man told a good tale, so you could picture the terrain and the progress of the action exactly.  Percy, who habitually relayed even schoolroom jokes backarseways, sank into relieved admiration―it _was_ going to be all right.

‘And now,’ Bertilak said, ‘your part in the exchange.’

Percy knew what he was going to say, something of a novel feeling. ‘I fear I had nothing that was not already yours, sir.  I only borrowed it for a spell.’

‘Well, well. Really. I always think a wine tastes the better for knowing the vine and the ground, don’t you?’

‘Some people like to guess.  I always get it wrong.’

Bertilak laughed.  ‘Your frankness will be the death of you, but not yet.  I think you’re mistaken, by the way.  You were given something―a pleasure―that’s none of mine.  How do you propose to give it back?’

‘In my own person, sir.’

‘Very generous. But is it what you would choose? I would not have you bound―not by obligation, anyway.’

‘Yes,’ Percy said, with the simplicity that was his only social art.

‘Then latch that door and come here.’ 

Odd to reflect, in these circumstances, disrobing was a service any knight’s training fitted him to render another.  And what tenderness it could be when chaste, and how rough now, with Bertilak kissing his mouth, his neck, his (thrice-broken, once badly set) collarbones, with hard, quick hands seeking his skin under his shirt.  It was a bit like fighting, but it was more like hunting―no, like becoming the hunt.  Not the quarry, the hunt itself, the whole thing, the forest, the men, the animals, the danger and fear, the joy, the motion―ungovernably excited, he reached for Bertilak’s hard cock, that was starting against his belly―and found his hand stayed with something he didn’t often encounter, strength greater than his own, more implacable―

―the killing, the gutting.

‘Why?’ Percy breathed, ‘aa wanted―tha wanted―aa c’d see―feel―’

‘If you want to―receive something then you have to learn how to take it.’

‘What’s that s’pose mean?’

Bertilak disengaged himself briskly. ‘I mean it is singular that a man will rebuke another in the afternoon for doing what he himself did in the forenoon.’

‘That’s, that’s different―she―I―can’t you see? I was guarding your honour―I swore you service.’

‘Then you cannot very well protest that I guard hers.’

‘I can protest any damned thing I choose―’

(‘Well, that’s true enough,’ Bertilak muttered.)

‘―say what? She has no honour apart from yours, that she’s determined to bewray with every dunghill cock that struts through that gate and half the capons inside it too, I’ll warrant―and when I halt her whoring in recompense I’m snubbed in my desire and called hypocrite on top of all―God’s blood, this is a cankered world, all gall and worms, I should spend my days piss-drunk in Eastcheap with robbers and heretics and sodomites and―and―p-publicans―for all the good it has ever done me to pursue honour to the ends of the earth to find her a crimped and painted drab―and still I serve her, no more than an indentured potman to a cunt-mongering punk―and as for that craven whippet that pranced to his throne on the shoulders of Percy―for all my service my meed is to be whipped here to this heathenish land at his pleasure, my honour trampled in the clarted mire to complete his tinsel revel―Percy! Esperance!  God knows I have no hope but to die, and am sharp-set to leave this shit-shotten world―if only I could do it in defence of something good, and true, and upright, instead of for a trumpery―’

Bertilak put his forefingers to Percy’s lips.  ‘This is not seemly speech.  But perhaps I should not have said such sharp words to one who has to undergo what you must two days hence.  There is no reassurance mortal man can offer in the face of such a trial.  I pray you, take what comfort you will of everything that is mine in the day remaining. Shall we keep to our bargain one more day?  I have enjoyed it, and hope to enjoy it a little more.  Let’s forget this foolish misunderstanding.  We’ll go together down, sir?’

Percy couldn’t see what comfort there was in dishonour bound up in silk and vair, and mortal sin dressed as cates, but he acquiesced mutinously.

Lady Elizabeth sent word she was indisposed, and could not appear in public for the rest of the day.  Her husband went to attend her in her private chambers.  The old duenna, relieved by Bertilak’s unguessed-at uxoriousness to her own amusements, offered Percy a game of chess, but she outplayed him in four moves.

‘You should play my wife.’

‘I shall. I shall play everyone’s wife.’  She waved her hand towards the band of gut-scrapers mincing and mithering in the gallery.  ‘Lovely sweet voice he has, isn’t it?  Take comfort, bach, and sleep well.’

He hadn’t a notion what the mad old Welsh bint meant about wives, but he wished everybody would stop telling him to take comfort in things when he had two more sunrises to see before his head was supposed to be lopped off by this green freak who had made Lucifer cuckold.  It didn’t help his mood one bit.

That night Percy dreamt that Elizabeth’s old nurse was queen of an empire that covered a quarter of the world, and she had a Jew as her Lord Chancellor and Douglas to her master of hunt, and she took Douglas to her bed and he boasted to Percy of fucking her greasy gash and her blubbering gob.  

Sleep was gone then, so at dawn he heard his chamber door open, close, and the key turn. Elizabeth’s dainty steps crossed the room.  She put her head in at the bed-curtain.

‘Would you have mere joy of me, Harry?’

What did it matter?  What in hell did any of it matter?  He would never see his wife or children or lands or friends again, and here was soft and yielding comfort. That was what he was supposed to do, wasn't it?  Take comfort?  Well, so he would. 

'Come then, pet. Tha'll starve out there int cold, anygait.'

Under her mantle she wore only a chemise and a green silk girdle tied around her hips.  ‘Take this,’ she said, untying it, ‘and use it how you will.’  She took off her shift and curled shivering into bed, with her back to him.  He had her like that and it was sweet enough for a man’s last full day on earth, if nothing much to his taste. She seemed underwhelmed too, which he’d heard meant he wouldn't leave a bastard behind him, but he didn’t believe _that_ for a minute: the English _chevauchées_ in France were not what they were in the days of King Edward, but even the diminished raids he’d witnessed duly produced their squawking platoons of by-blows.  With that uncomfortable thought, he fell asleep with his legs still entwined in hers, and woke to her departing steps and crushing _tristia_.  She had left the girdle. It was embroidered with golden leaves and the words _bis vivit qui bene vivit_ , a pretty vile commonplace tag.  He turned it over in his hands, and thought of a use that he might have put it to that would have rendered him but little pleasure at the time, but much in eventual restitution.  Percy groaned.  He thought he understood at last how this game worked, and something of his desires. 

Bertilak came into the hall at dusk after a miserable, bruising day’s sport, to find Percy uncharacteristically and perhaps hysterically cheerful, blunt features feverish with fire and wine and feminine company, his hardy physique flattered into trimness by a midnight-blue cotehardie, the faintly antique cut of which Bertilak remembered as being absolutely the coming thing about the time of the former king’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia; Percy had obviously had some commerce with the chamberlain and a chest of garments that had through carelessness, sentiment or fraud escaped remaking.  Percy jumped up to embrace him, whispering as he did,

‘Come to me tonight to make the exchange―please―’

Bertilak nodded.  They pledged each other all night into profound, ardent intoxication.

And so, when the company had broken for the night, and everyone had dismissed their attendants, the lord of Hautdesert went to his guest’s chamber, and had joy compleat of him, pulling his own outmoded clothes from a body at once ideally fashioned and hopelessly disfigured: sandy hair cut in a rough parody of current style; forward-thrust jaw, lower teeth closed on the upper, which deformed broad, pale, sensitive lips; neck almost delicate, half-obscured by hefty bulked shoulders; chest and arms so knurled with scar tissue that they were nigh-hairless; bony hands bearing the faded callus of martial exercise rather than the irrevocable hardness of labour; supple slender waist, broad, short cock and tight, small ballsack; a deep feminine curve which gave onto muscular, squarish buttocks; powerful, sinewy thighs; thick calves and ankles; flat swollen feet with toenails yellow and crumbling where they were at all.  

Percy’s appetite for struggle ending in subjection and service amused and touched rather than aroused him, but a sardonic sort of amusement was a physical satisfaction to Bertilak, so he was well content to bite those contorted lips to the point of bleeding, bruise that fine neck, to crush one of Percy’s arms beneath his body and hold down the other wrist while he pinched, stroked and teased with his free hand.  He noted with the benign disinterest that the act induced that Percy knew how to suck cock tolerably well, which he hadn’t quite expected.  There was a man somewhere, then; this attentive semi-competence bespoke a lover rather than barrack-room traffic.  Bertilak felt a pang of―indignation, swilled the emotion round like a leech examining piss in a flask, and discarded it: a penchant for virginity was a rather vulgar thing to entertain, after all. 

Percy, for his part guilelessly thrilled to feel strength that could truly constrain him, contrived ever more enthusiastic submission to his host, until there remained only one thing to do in fulfilment of their compact.

‘I release you, if you would be released―’

‘Naw―aa’m joined.’

Bertilak fucked him as swiftly and savagely as his earlier caresses had been lingering.  There was no cruelty, no desire to inflict pain―Percy, on his elbows and knees on the bed, smelt a heady, untraceable memory before he yielded to one slick finger, two, then the darker pressure of Bertilak’s weighty prick―but equally, no sign of erstwhile affection.  Bertilak thrust hard and deep for a few moments, then, kneeling up, clamped a heavy paw on Percy’s throat, pulling him back towards his great furred chest, while his other hand reached round to work Percy’s cock.  There could be no hope of exquisite delay under such usage―Percy’s back arched and he spent like it was the world’s last night―Bertilak released his grip only to push the heel of his hand against Percy’s nape, thrust a few more times, and came inside him with a short growl.

Percy watched his host pull on braies, shirt and hose, a hulking shadow made diabolic by fire- and candlelight.  Bertilak pulled something from the folds of his robe before settling it on his shoulders and threw it down in the middle of the room.  He took a light and left the room without a word.  Percy crept across and picked it up: it was a fox-fur, uncured, fresh but scabby and patchy. 

He slept wringing it in his hands, and dreamt that he was camped in a deep earthwork on a battlefield that hadn’t moved for twenty months.  Men fought with guns that fired a hundred times faster than the best bowmen could, drowned in holes ten times deeper than he’d ever seen on the churned and bloody fields that made his name.  Kate was fighting beside him and they were struggling across the mud in dismal retreat when she lost her head to some invisible elvish weapon.

Then a purpled pitted face was leaning in breathing drink and puke and drink again all over him.  He nutted it.  This effected its disappearance for some indeterminate but too-short period, for the cost of a cracked brow and cognizance of the sort of hangover that wasn’t going to be dispelled by fresh air and a draught of small beer, cheap at half the― 

‘Piss off.  Aa’m naw ganging t’dee the day.  Aa’ve better things t’do,’ he announced thickly.

But in all truth he hadn’t, he never did have anything better to do than go out and die, and first light found him dressing and arming. Feeling he needed all the luck he could get, he cut a forepaw from Bertilak’s fox-pelt and tucked it into his glove.  He had the retainer wake the chaplain, to whom he vouchsafed a confession half-incomprehensible with crapulous Northumbrian and the rest so incredible to an urbane cleric marooned by mischance and malpractice in the arse-end of the back of beyond that he received absolution wholly undeserved with a scanty penance.  Even to Percy, who typically only registered that he had committed a sin when he had already largely atoned for it, this felt somewhat inadequate, but it would have to do.

Belatedly, he remembered the girdle, but it was too late for that now.  No amount of gold thread and bad Latin was going to stop Damascus steel from severing your neckbone and windpipe, he told himself crossly, but was glad anyway when he met his guide in the courtyard and the servant handed it to him.

‘Thought you might be wanting this, sir.  It is the sort of thing gentlemen do want, in my experience, much good as it does them.  Here sir, allow me.’

Percy hitched up the skirts of his surcoat and the man fastened the girdle around his hips.

‘Aa pr’aps shouldn’t’ve.’  Percy awkwardly inclined his head at the servant’s bloody nose.  ‘You startled me.  I thought you were—someone I’d seen before.’

The fellow stood up.

‘Don’t think I can be, sir, begging your pardon. I’ve always served Sir Bertilak.  Never been to the north country or anything like that, sir.’

‘Hm. Not broke, is it?’

‘No, sir.’  (It was, but resetting his own broken nose was something the man had done before and would do again.)

They rode through craggy countryside, leading the horses where the terrain was rough and steep.  It seemed a lot further than two miles, especially in the valleys which harboured freezing mist, but at length they came back to the high ground.  The servant pointed down into a deep gorge.  

‘There you go, sir.  I wouldn’t bother if I were you.  It’s not a Christian place, and what lives in it isn’t a man, if you get me, sir.’

‘I’ve met him.’

‘No-one need know, sir―if you were to.  No-one’s expecting you back anyway, pardon me for putting it so blunt.  I can be very discreet, sir.’

‘Thank you.  No, I mean it, thank you.  It’s not possible, but thank you for your concern. Here, give this to Sir Bertilak. Tell him I commend your service and wish it well-rewarded.’

‘Yes, sir.’  If there was anything weirder than the valley of the Green Chapel, it was the sight of the Hotspur of the North grey-faced, polite and subdued.  The retainer turned his mare around and spurred her hard.  He didn’t look at the token in his hand until he was out of sight.  It was a fox’s paw.  With an instinct which superseded even the pursuit of gain, and he was a poor man, he flung it into the undergrowth, and rode not back to the castle, but towards Watling Street and London.

Percy picked his way down into the gorge, leading his skittish horse.  There was nothing here that remotely resembled a chapel: just sharp rocks over which fell-water bubbled, acres of moss, banks of snow melted and refrozen, and stunted, bare trees. Then he saw a sort of knoll in the middle distance. He tethered the beast and walked slowly towards it.  It seemed to be a kind of cave, perhaps not naturally formed, with three apertures, one facing him, one at each side.  The bleak hostility of the place answered something dreadful in himself.  He would have been reassured to be terrified, for that would mean he were not in a state of mortal sin. 

He called; his voice echoed and died into the rushing water.  It was one thing to summon the devil; quite another for him to come.  And another yet to shame him.

Gradually, he became aware of another sound: a rhythmic metallic sussuration, building to a screech, then falling away, beginning again, a sound familiar in a place utterly alien: blade on whetstone.

‘Come out here and face me, you dirty bugger.  Your bloody axe is sharp enough.’

No reply.  The stropping and wailing continued.  Percy yelled again, an inarticulate holler.

A voice sounded from a nearby crag, soft and ironic, much too close, ‘You _are_ very anxious to get what’s coming to you, aren’t you?’

Percy froze.  Fear, hitherto elusive, found and gripped him; he decided there was nothing reassuring about it at all.  He was going to die alone in mortal sin, and (somehow worse) something about that insinuating tone told him his killer knew exactly what he’d been up to last night to get himself into that unhappy state.  It was all he could do for the moment not to crap himself like a boy at his first battle.

The green man emerged, whirling his axe about his head, stamping and shuffling.  It was an absurd performance; somehow he looked less real, and rather smaller, here in his native black valley among the moss and meltwater, than he had in Westminster.  But Percy no longer doubted his authenticity.

‘Well,’ he said stupidly, ‘I’m here.’  He pulled off his helmet and struggled with his neck-piece.

‘So I see. Do you need a hand with that gorget?’

‘Don’t touch me, you filthy unnatural―’  He released the final piece of plate, and he stood with his neck bare.

‘Now,’ said the green man, ‘all I ask is that you bow your head―just so, yes―and stand as staunch as I did for you.  Nothing to it really.’

Percy knew he should probably close his eyes, but he couldn’t help watching out of the corner of one.  The axe was raised, the green arms tensed for a bone-splitting blow, the weapon began its descent, Percy measured the trajectory and―

‘Call yourself the Hotspur of the North?  You nithering arsehole.  Did I even blink when you did this to me, eh?’

‘Aa’m―Jesu―. Look, I’m _sorry_. I’ve managed to get to nearly thirty by _not_ standing still when fellows swing axes at my neck.  It becomes a bit of a habit.’

The green knight wasn’t mollified.  ‘Well, we’ll have to do it again now.  This is a bore.’

This time Percy shut his eyes, stood still, and prayed hard.

He listened to the axe streeling through the air, and then―nothing.  A grotesque peal of the devil’s own laughter bust forth and he opened his eyes to the green man capering and chortling.  He had only goddamn gone and pulled the stroke―but―Percy remembered the irresistible momentum, the shattering recoil.

‘Christ's shrivelled bollocks. How in the name of all that's unholy did y'do that?’

The green knight ignored him.  ‘Now, you seem to have got your spine back, we’ll have one more go, shall we?’

‘No!―What the―? That’s not f―’ But the axe was already in flight, four feet of Damascus green steel hell screaming towards him.  Percy dived forward into an unforgiving snow-bank; the blade sheared against his neck, almost gently, a kiss, that merely split the skin and wheeled away; he rolled, found his feet, and turning, drew his sword on―

‘Well, fuck me rigid with St Michael's foot-long purple tarse.’

‘I’m actually a bit surprised you hadn’t guessed.  If they ever retell this story people will cop it almost from the start.  You’re not really much of a guesser, though, are you?’

Percy’s astonishment for once outran his capacity for impassioned and dubiously consecutive speech.  He gaped at the lord of Hautdesert like a particularly ruddy mullet: the iced-over snow had scraped raw his brow, chin, and nose.  The wound on his neck started to bleed in earnest.

‘I daresay I owe you an explanation, Harry―I may call you Harry, may I?’

‘Aa’d―think so, yes.’

‘I’d appreciate it if you’d sheathe that.  Thank you.  You may like to staunch your neck, too.  Messy, but superficial.  The girdle you have on under your surcoat should do for now. Ghastly Latin.  I did say, but would she listen?’

‘How’d you―?’

‘My dear Harry―what did I say about guessing? Here, let me. Now, there you are, that’ll hold until we get back to the castle, and I’ll have someone see to it.  Shame to ruin the silk.  Might’ve been handy for―something or another.  Maybe it’ll wash out.’  Bertilak took Percy by the elbow.  ‘Anyway, what was I saying? The whole thing begins with a Welshwoman―as lots of things do, I’m afraid―’

***

Every schoolchild knows the extraordinary role played by Bertilak de Hautdesert (c.1355-c.1410) in uniting factions opposing Henry IV in the early 15th century.  His persuasive manoeuvring between various parties, cementing alliances and maintaining morale, contributed in no small way to the rebels’ victory at Shrewsbury in 1403, though scholarship now inclines to the view that he was not himself present on the field.  Almost as spectacular was the immediate and total collapse of this unity after the accession of Edmund I (r.1403-05), plunging England into catastrophic civil dissension not truly resolved until the reign of Richeldis I (r.1558-1603).  De Hautdesert’s popular reputation as a magician is without doubt traceable to his achievement of what contemporaries as well as historians considered a political impossibility, and equally, perhaps, to its precipitous and bloody break-up. Ballads showing him in this character can be proved to have circulated if not in his own lifetime then very shortly afterwards.  The best-known of these, however, the witty and touching ‘The Lord of Hautdesert and the Duke of York’ (Child #306; Roud #1364), dates from the mid-16th century at the earliest.  There is still much debate about the role played by de Hautdesert’s close connection to and particular friendship with Edward, Duke of York (c.1373-1415), in the disastrous dissolution of the rebels’ alliance. De Hautdesert fades from view around 1407, and in documents of the second decade of the 15th century his demise is presumed.  Nothing is known of the circumstances of his death or his place of burial.  Though many literary sources feature a wife, he is not believed to have married and no natural issue is recorded. [―L.B.] 

**Author's Note:**

> Richeldis I is a little homage to angevin2: http://archiveofourown.org/works/298856


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